2011 Reading Update #5

A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin. This is the latest book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. We’ve been waiting on this book for almost 6 years. I was so excited to finally have it. It’s good, but it moves at a very slow pace. There’s way too much filler. It doesn’t pack as big of a punch as previous books in the series. Hopefully we won’t have to wait nearly as long for the next book.

Ford County: Stories, John Grisham. It probably wasn’t a good idea to read this after reading a George R.R. Martin book. Grisham doesn’t stack up. Ford County: Stories is a series of short stories set in fictional Ford County, Mississippi, which was first introduced in A Time to Kill. This book is alright, but it’s definitely not Grisham’s best work. A lot of these stories would make a good episode of one of the many TV procedural dramas out there.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson. This is book 2 of the Millennium Trilogy. It is so good! I think I liked it more than the first book. There was some stuff early in the book that I kept waiting to be important later, but it didn’t really come back up. Maybe it’ll come back up in the final book, which I should be starting tonight.

Ready Player One, Ernest Cline. This is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while. It’s set in the near future and the world has gone to crap. Most people go into this online virtual world called the OASIS to escape from reality. The creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, has died, and decided to leave his billions to the person who can find an easter egg that he hid in the OASIS. Halliday was obsessed with the 80s, so the contest to find the egg is filled with references from the 80s. The story centers on Wade Watts, one of the many players hunting for the golden egg. I’m more of a child of the 90s more than the 80s, but I got a lot of the references and I was geeking out the whole time I was reading this book. This book isn’t just one 80s reference after another. It’s about friendship, survival, living in the real world vs. the online world, how we make friends online, etc. I highly recommend it.